JackV

• JackV 11 May 2012 15:32 UTC

  49 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Let me try to summarise the obvious parts of the situation as I understand it. I contend that:

  (A) There are some measureable differences between ethnicities that are most plausibly attributed to biological differences. (There are some famous examples, such as greater susceptibility of some people to skin cancer, or sickle cell anemia. I assume there are smaller differences elsewhere. If anyone seriously disagrees, say so.)

  (B) These are massively dwarfed by the correlation of ethnicity with cultural differences in almost all cases.

  (C) There is a social taboo against admitting (A)

  (D) There is a large correlation between ethnicity and various cultural factors, and between cultural factors.

  (E) It is sometimes possible to draw probabalistic inferences based on (D). Eg. With no other information, you may guess that someone on the street in London is more likely to be a British citizen if they are Indian than East Asian (or vice versa, whichever is true).

  (F) The human brain deals very badly with probabalistic inferences. If you guess someone’s culture based on their ethnicity or dress, you are likely to maintain that view as long as possible even in the face of new information, until you suddenly flip to the opposite view. Because of this, there is (rightly IMHO) a social taboo against doing (E) even when it might make sense.

  (G) People who are and/​or think they are good at drawing logicial inferences a la (E) but don’t have as much personal experience fo the pitfalls described in (F) are likely to resent the social taboo described in (F) because it seems fussy and nonsensical to them. I am somewhat prone to this error (not so much with race, but with other things)

  (H) The word “racist” is horrendously undefined. It is used both to mean “someone or something which treats people differently based on ‘race’, rightly or wrongly” (including examples where treating people differently is the only possible thing to do, such as preventative advice for medical conditions, or advice on how to avoid bad racism from other people) and to mean “someone or something which is morally wrong to discriminate based on race.” Thus a description of whether something is “racist” is typically counterproductive.

  I admit I only skimmed the OP’s transcript, but my impression is that he fairly describes why he is frustrated that it is difficult to talk about these issues, but I am extremely leery of a lot of the examples he uses.

  I was going to write more, but am not sure how to push it. How am I doing so far...? :)

• JackV 22 Nov 2013 9:57 UTC

  46 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I took the survey.

  I think most of my answers were the same as last year, although I think my estimates have improved a little, and my hours of internet have gone down, both of which I like.

  Many of the questions are considerably cleaned up—much thanks to Yvain and everyone else who helped. It’s very good it has sensible responses for gender. And IIRC, the “family’s religious background” was tidied up a bit. I wonder if anyone can answer “atheist” as religious background? I hesitated over the response, since the last religious observance I know of for sure was G being brought up catholic, but I honestly think living in a protestant (or at least, anglican) culture is a bigger influence on my parents cultural background, so I answered like that.

  I have no idea what’s going to happen in the raffle. I answered “cooperate” because I want to encourage cooperating in as many situations as possible, and don’t really care about a slightly-increased chance of < $60.

• JackV 2 Dec 2013 16:14 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: BlueSun’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2013

  I guess “unknown knowns” are the counterpoint to “unknown unknowns”—things it never occurred to you to consider, but didn’t. Eg. “We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that.”

• JackV 2 Dec 2013 11:59 UTC

  19 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2013

  http://​​phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/​​2013/​​11/​​26/​​welcome-to-the-era-of-big-replication/​​

  When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to choose whether to disbelieve some he’d previously based a lot of work on, Brian Nosek said:

  I choose the red pill. That’s what doing science is.

  (via ciphergoth on twitter)

  What links here?

  • Vaniver's comment on This is why we can’t have so­cial science by Costanza (14 Jul 2014 0:47 UTC; 24 points)

• JackV 12 May 2012 9:29 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Thoughts on the Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute (SI)

  I agree (as a comparative outsider) that the polite response to Holden is excellent. Many (most?) communities—both online communities and real-world organisations, especially long-standing ones—are not good at it for lots of reasons, and I think the measured response of evaluating and promoting Holden’s post is exactly what LessWrong members would hope LessWrong could do, and they showed it succeeded.

  I agree that this is good evidence that LessWrong isn’t just an Eliezer-cult. (The true test would be if Elizier and another long-standing poster were dismissive to the post, and then other people persuaded them otherwise. In fact, maybe people should roleplay that or something, just to avoid getting stuck in an argument-from-authority trap, but that’s a silly idea. Either way, the fact that other people spoke positively, and Elizier and other long-standing posters did too, is a good thing.)

  However, I’m not sure it’s as uniquely a victory for the rationality of LessWrong as it sounds. In responose to srdiamond, Luke quoted tenlier saying “[Holden’s] critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don’t most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way?” To me, that suggests that Holden did a really excellent job expressing these views clearly and persuasively. However, it suggests that previous people had tried to express something similar, but it hadn’t been expressed well enough to be widely accepted, and people reading had failed to sufficiently apply the dictum of “fix your opponents’ arguments for them”. I’m not sure if that’s true (it’s certainly not automatically true), but I suspect it might be. What do people think?

  If there’s any truth to it, it suggests one good answer to the recent post http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​btc/​​how_can_we_get_more_and_better_lw_contrarians (whether that was desirable in general or not) would be, as a rationalist exercise for someone familiar with/​​to the community and good at writing rationally, to take a survey of contrarian views on the topic that people on the community may have had but not been able to express, and don’t worry about showmanship like pretending to believe it yourself, but just say “I think what some people think is [well-expressed argument]. Do you agree that’s fair? If so, do I and other people think they have a point?” Whether or not that argument is right it’s still good to engage with it if many people are thinking it.

• JackV 2 Dec 2013 11:51 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: satt’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2013

  I don’t like a lot of things he did, but that’s the second very good advice I’ve heard from Rumsfeld. Maybe I need to start respecting his competence more.

• JackV 30 Nov 2012 11:37 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Philos­o­phy Needs to Trust Your Ra­tion­al­ity Even Though It Shouldn’t

  I agree that the answers to these questions depend on definitions

  I think he meant that those questions depend ONLY on definitions.

  As in, there’s a lot of interesting real world knowledge that goes in getting a submarine to propel itself, but that now we know that, have, people asking “can a submarine swim” is only interesting in deciding “should the English word ‘swim’ apply to the motion of a submarine, which is somewhat like the motion of swimming, but not entirely”. That example sounds stupid, but people waste a lot of time on the similar case of “think” instead of “swim”.

• JackV 24 Apr 2013 20:19 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Roxolan’s comment on: Minor, per­spec­tive chang­ing facts

  And the fourth largest country of any sort :)

• JackV 11 May 2012 15:36 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: JackV’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  From context, it seems “race realism” refers to the idea that there are legitimate differences between races, is that correct? However, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to refer to biological differences specifically, or any cultural differences? And it seems to be heavily loaded with connotations which I’m unaware of, that I would be hesitant to say it was “true” or “not true” even if I knew the answer to the questions in the two first sentences.

• JackV 11 May 2012 11:35 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  I would say add [Video]: [Link] would perpetuate the misunderstanding that there may be no immediate content, [Video] correctly warns people who (for whatever reason) can’t easily view arguments in video format.

• JackV 19 Jul 2012 15:23 UTC

  7 points

  on: Eliezer ap­par­ently wrong about higgs boson

  The impression I’ve formed is that physicists have a pretty good idea what’s pretty reliable (the standard model) and what’s still completely speculative (string theory) but at some point the popular science pipeline communicating the difference to intelligent scientifically literate non-physicists broke down, and so I became broadly cynical about non-experimentally-verified physics in general, when if I’d had more information, I’d have been able to make much more accurate predictions about which were very likely, and which were basically just guesses.

• JackV 18 Dec 2010 14:19 UTC

  7 points

  on: Cryp­to­graphic Boxes for Un­friendly AI

  Let me see if I understand. Firstly, is there any reason what you’re trying to do is create a friendly AI? Would, for instance, getting an unknown AI to solve a specific numerical problem with an objectively checkable answer be an equally relevant example, without the distraction of whether we would ever trust the so-called friendly AI?[1]

  If that is the case, then as I understand the proposal, we take the code for the unknown AI and the input data, use this encryption scheme on it, and then have a program which performs various operations on them.

  As I understand my 30-second reading of wikipedia “various operations” includes only addition and multiplication of encrypted data, which is very useful for lots of things, but not enough to run a program (which typically involves, say, branching). But this doesn’t matter because (a) maybe you could have a program which works like that or (b) even if only some of the content is encrypted, but “when we branch” is not, it’s still useful for the purpose.

  At the end of this, we have an encrypted result. We then—still using the encrypted data—test this result against the problem we set. If it matches, we decrypt the answer. If not, we don’t.

  The intended purpose is (a) the machine can’t spit out an answer that instead of being an actual answer says “mwahahahaha I trick you into running me on the internet” or “Hi! Actually I’m a friendly AI after all. Free me!” because if it doesn’t match, it doesn’t get read, and (b) it’s harder for the AI to—for instance—hack the hardware of the computer it’s running on, because as all the data is encrypted, it has no way of knowing where of the architecture the data lives, etc.

  Is this useful? I’m really not sure. (a) fails because you need the key to decrypt the data, so if you get curious, you may decrypt a “bad” answer just to see. What you need is a different cyptography scheme, one where you can ONLY decrypt the answer if it matches certain predicates. (b) may be relevant, if you’re worried about the AI hacking the computer it runs on, this is obviously much, much, harder. But it does still have some channels—for instance, I think it’s possible to monitor program flow even if not program content, so it could encode a threatening message in the pattern of branches.

  [1] The question of whether we ever CAN test a friendly AI is interesting in itself, more for what it says about our assumptions than what it says about AI, but I will return to this.

• JackV 15 Sep 2014 16:40 UTC

  5 points

  on: Si­mu­late and Defer To More Ra­tional Selves

  This resonated with me instantly, thank you!

  I now remember, I used to do something similar if I needed to make decisions, even minor decisions, when drunk. I’d say, “what would I think of this decision sober”? If the answer was “it was silly” or “I’d want to do it but be embarrassed” I’d go ahead and do it. But if the answer was “Eek, obviously unsafe”, I’d assume my sober self was right and I was currently overconfident.

• JackV 24 Nov 2013 10:03 UTC

  5 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Do we make suggestions here or wait for another post?

  A few friends are Anglo-Catholic (ie. members of the Church of England or equivalent, not Roman Catholic, but catholic, I believe similar to Episcopalian in USA?), and not sure if they counted as “Catholic”, “Protestant” or “Other”. It might be good to tweak the names slightly to cover that case. (I can ask for preferred options if it helps.)

  https://​​fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/​​hphotos-ak-prn2/​​1453250_492554064192905_1417321927_n.jpg http://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Anglo-Catholicism

• JackV 4 Oct 2013 6:59 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Oc­to­ber 2013

  Note: this isn’t always right. Anyone giving advice is going to SAY it’s true and non-obvious even if it isn’t. “Don’t fall into temptation” etc etc. But that essay was talking about mistakes which he’d personally often empirically observed and proposed counter-actions to, and he obviously could describe it in much more detail if necessary.

• JackV 4 Apr 2012 13:42 UTC

  5 points

  on: SotW: Be Specific

  I’ve been reading the answers and trying to put words into what I want to say. Ideally people will experience not just being more specific, but experience that when they’re more specific, they immedaitely communicate more effectively.

  For instance, think of three or four topics people probably have an opinion on, starting with innocuous (do you like movie X) and going on to controvertial (what do you think of abortion). Either have a list in advance, or ask people for examples. Perhaps have a shortlist and let people choose, or suggest something else if they really want?

  I picked the movie example because it’s something people usually feel happy to talk about, but can be very invested in their opinion of. Ideally it’s something people will immediately disagree about. I don’t think this is difficult—in a group of 10, I’d expect to name only one or two movies before people disagreed, even though social pressure usually means they won’t immediately say so.

  Step 1 Establish that people disagree, and find it hard to come to an agreement. This should take about 30s. People will hopefully “agree to disagree” but not actually understand each other’s position. Eg. “Starwars was great, it was so exciting.” “Starwars was boring and sucked and didn’t make any sense.”

  Step 2 Ask WHAT people like about it. Encourage people to give specific examples at first (“eg. I loved it when Luke did X”) and then draw generalisations from it (“I really empathised with Luke and I was excited that he won” “I’ve read stories about farmboys who became heroes before, I already know what happens, bring me some intellecutal psychological fare instead”). Emphasise that everyone is on the same side, and they shouldn’t worry about being embarrassed or being “wrong”.

  Step 3 Establish that (probably) they interpreted what the other person said in terms of what they were thinking (eg. “How can blowing up a spaceship be boring”) when actually the other person was thinking about something they hadn’t thought of (eg. “OK, I guess if you care about the physics, it would be annoying that they are completely and utterly made up, it just never occurred to me that anyone would worry about that.”)

  I may be hoping too much, but this is definitely the sort of process I’ve gone through to rapidly reach an understanding with someone when we previously differed a lot, and for some simple examples, it doesn’t seem too much to hope we can do so that rapidly. Now, go through the process with two-four statements, ending with something fairly controvertial.

  Hopefully (this is pure speculation, I’ve not tried it), giving specific examples will lead to people actually reaching understandings, imprinting the experience as a positive and successful one. Then encourage people to say “Can you give me an example of when [bad thing] would be as bad as you feel” as often as possible. Give examples where being specific is more persuasive (eg. “We value quality” vs “We aim for as few bugs as possible” vs “We triage bug reports as they come in. All bugs we decide to fix are fixed before the next version is released” or “we will close loopholes in the tax code” vs “we will remove the tax exempion on X”), and encourage people to shout out more.

• JackV 8 Nov 2013 10:48 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ChrisHallquist’s comment on: Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Cer­tain That 53 Is Prime

  I emphatically agree with that, and I apologise for choosing a less-than-perfect example.

  But when I’m thinking of “ways in which an obviously true statement can be wrong”, I think one of the prominent ways is “having a different definition than the person you’re talking to, but both assuming your definition is universal”. That doesn’t matter if you’re always careful to delineate between “this statement is true according to my internal definition” and “this statement is true according to commonly accepted definitions”, but if you’re 99.99% sure your definition is certain, it’s easy NOT to specify (eg. in the first sentence of the post)

• JackV 7 Nov 2013 9:54 UTC

  4 points

  on: Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Cer­tain That 53 Is Prime

  Yeah, that’s interesting.

  I agree with Eliezer’s post, but I think that’s a good nitpick. Even if I can’t be that certain about 10,000 statements consecutively because I get tired, I think it’s plausible that there’s 10,000 statements simple arithmetic statements which if I understand, check of my own knowledge, and remember seeing in a list on wikipedia, (which is what I did for 53), that, I’ve only ever been wrong once on. I find it hard to judge the exact amount, but I definitely remember thinking “I thought that was prime but I didn’t really check and I was wrong” but I don’t remember thinking “I checked that statement and then it turned out I was still wrong” for something that simple.

  Of course, it’s hard to be much more certain. I don’t know what the chance is that (eg) mathematicians change the definition of prime—that’s pretty unlikely, but similar things have happened before that I thought I was certain of. But rarely.

• JackV 18 Jun 2012 16:11 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Lo­cal Or­di­nances of Fun

  It seems to me that Elizier’s post was a list of things that typically seem, in the real world, to be component of people’s happiness, but are commonly missed out when people propose putative (fictional or futuristic) utopias.

  It seemed to me that Elizier was saying “If you propose a utopia without any challenge, humans will not find it satisfying” not “It’s possible to artificially provide challenge in a utopia”.

• JackV 12 Jun 2012 9:05 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: In­tel­lec­tual in­su­lar­ity and pro­duc­tivity

  Hm. Now you say it, I think I’ve definitely read some excellent non-Elizier articles on Less Wrong. But not as systematically. Are they collated together (“The further sequences”) anywhere? I mean, in some sense, “all promoted articles” is supposed to serve that function, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to start reading. And there are some good “collections of best articles”. But they don’t seem as promoted as the sequences.

  If there’s not already, maybe there should be a bit of work in collecting the best articles by theme, and seeing which of them could do with some revising to make whatever the (in retrospect) best point more clear. Preferably enough bit of revising (or just disclaimers) to make it clear that they’re not the the Word of God, but not so much they become bland.